Chambers of the character here described contain in almost every instance stone sarcophagi.  These are ranged along the walls, at a little distance from them.  The chambers commonly contain two or three; but sometimes one sarcophagus is superimposed upon another, and in this way the number occasionally reaches to six.[660] Mostly, the sarcophagi are plain, or nearly so, but are covered over with a sloping lid.  Sometimes, however, they are elaborately carved, and constitute works of art, which are of the highest value.  An account will be given of the most remarkable of these objects in the chapter on Phoenician AEsthetic Art.

Another distinct type of Phoenician tomb is that which is peculiar to Nea-Paphos, and which is thought by some to have been employed exclusively by the High Priests of the great temple there.[661] The peculiarity of these burial-places is, that the sepulchral chambers are adjuncts of a quadrangular court open to the sky, and surrounded by a colonnade supported on pillars.[662] The court, the colonnade, the pillars, the entablature, and the chambers, with their niches for the dead, are all equally cut out of the rock, as well as the passage by which the court is entered, at one corner of the quadrangle.  The columns are either square or rounded, the rounded ones having capitals resembling those of the Doric order; and the entablature is also a rough imitation of the Doric triglyphs, and guttae.  The entrances to the sepulchral chambers are under the colonnade, behind the pillars;[663] and the chambers contain, beside niches, a certain number of bases for sarcophagi, but no sarcophagi have been found in them.  The quadrangle is of a small size, not more than about eighteen feet each way.

Thus far we have described that portion of the sepulchral architecture of the Phoenicians which is most hidden from sight, lying, as it does, beneath the surface of the soil.  With tombs of this quiet character the Phoenicians were ordinarily contented.  They were not, however, wholly devoid of those feelings with respect to their dead which have caused the erection, in most parts of the world, of sepulchral monuments intended to attract the eye, and to hand on to later ages the memory of the departed.  Well acquainted with Egypt, they could not but have been aware from the earliest times of those massive piles which the vanity of Egyptian monarchs had raised up for their own glorification on the western side of the valley of the Nile; nor in later days could such monuments have escaped their notice as the Mausoleum of Halicarnassus[664] or the Tomb of the Maccabees.[665] Accordingly, we find them, at a very remote period, not merely anxious to inter their dead decently and carefully in rock tombs or subterranean chambers of massive stone, but also wishful upon occasions to attract attention to the last resting-places of their great men, by constructions which showed themselves above the ground, and had some architectural pretensions.  One of these, situated